The Celtic Twilight eBook

“And I heard a call to me from there, ‘Help
me to come out o’ this!’ And when I looked
it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman,
and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant
of King O’Connor of Athenry.

“So I stretched out my hand first, but then
I called out, ’I’d be burned in the flames
before I could get within three yards of you.’
So then he said, ‘Well, help me with your prayers,’
and so I do.

“And Father Connellan says the same thing, to
help the dead with your prayers, and he’s a
very clever man to make a sermon, and has a great
deal of cures made with the Holy Water he brought back
from Lourdes.”

1902.

THE LAST GLEEMAN

Michael Moran was born about 1794 off Black Pitts,
in the Liberties of Dublin, in Faddle Alley.
A fortnight after birth he went stone blind from illness,
and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who were
soon able to send him to rhyme and beg at street corners
and at the bridges over the Liffey. They may
well have wished that their quiver were full of such
as he, for, free from the interruption of sight, his
mind became a perfect echoing chamber, where every
movement of the day and every change of public passion
whispered itself into rhyme or quaint saying.
By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted
rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties.
Madden, the weaver, Kearney, the blind fiddler from
Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M’Bride from heaven
knows where, and that M’Grane, who in after days,
when the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed
plumes, or rather in borrowed rags, and gave out that
there had never been any Moran but himself, and many
another, did homage before him, and held him chief
of all their tribe. Nor despite his blindness
did he find any difficulty in getting a wife, but
rather was able to pick and choose, for he was just
that mixture of ragamuffin and of genius which is dear
to the heart of woman, who, perhaps because she is
wholly conventional herself, loves the unexpected,
the crooked, the bewildering. Nor did he lack,
despite his rags, many excellent things, for it is
remembered that he ever loved caper sauce, going so
far indeed in his honest indignation at its absence
upon one occasion as to fling a leg of mutton at his
wife. He was not, however, much to look at, with
his coarse frieze coat with its cape and scalloped
edge, his old corduroy trousers and great brogues,
and his stout stick made fast to his wrist by a thong
of leather: and he would have been a woeful shock
to the gleeman MacConglinne, could that friend of
kings have beheld him in prophetic vision from the
pillar stone at Cork. And yet though the short
cloak and the leather wallet were no more, he was a
true gleeman, being alike poet, jester, and newsman
of the people. In the morning when he had finished
his breakfast, his wife or some neighbour would read
the newspaper to him, and read on and on until he interrupted
with, “That’ll do—­I have me
meditations”; and from these meditations would
come the day’s store of jest and rhyme.
He had the whole Middle Ages under his frieze coat.